OpenGL Headline News

The Khronos Group today announced the ratification and public release of the OpenCL 2.1 provisional specification. OpenCL 2.1 is a significant evolution of the open, royalty-free standard for heterogeneous parallel programming that defines a new kernel language based on a subset of C++ for significantly enhanced programmer productivity, and support for the new Khronos SPIR-V cross-API shader program intermediate language now used by both OpenCL and the new Vulkan graphics API.

The Khronos Group announced the availability of technical previews of the new Vulkan™ open standard API for high-efficiency access to graphics and compute on modern GPUs used in a wide variety of devices. This ground-up design, previously referred to as the Next Generation OpenGL Initiative, provides applications direct control over GPU acceleration for maximized performance and predictability, and uses Khronos’ new SPIR-V™ specification for shading language flexibility. Vulkan initial specifications and implementations are expected later this year and any company may participate in Vulkan’s ongoing development by joining Khronos.

Are you going to GDC? Be sure to reserve your spot for glNext and OpenCL sessions happening off-site at GDC. The OpenCL sessions are almost full, as is the noon glNext session. You may register on the Khronos Group event page.

The OpenGL hardware database goes open source, with the client side application to generate and upload OpenGL hardware reports ported to C++ (using Qt as the UI framework). The client side application has been ported over from pascal to C++ for a broader audience and has been made open source, available on github. In addition to the move to C++, the application also adds lots of new information for OpenGL hardware reports, like added capabilities (reports now contain up to almost 200 implementation capabilities) compressed texture formats and a preview for displaying information gathered from gl_arb_internalformat_query2, making it an even more handy tool for OpenGL developers. Binaries are currently available for windows, Linux and Mac OS can be compiled from the sources with binary distributions to follow. Alongside with the move to open source, the web front end also got lots of new functionality, including new report layouts, advanced search and filter options and better ways to compare different OpenGL reports.

KDAB are rewriting the Qt3D module of Qt 5 to provide an easy but flexible API for easily getting 3D content into your Qt applications using either C++ or QML. After reading this 4th article in the series, you will understand the difference between the Scenegraph and the Framegraph and see their respective uses. For the more adventurous amongst you, pick up a pre-release version of Qt3D and start experimenting to see what the Framegraph can do for you.